Hitchcock’s Rare Window

Big news in publishing. How big? Big enough to merit the front page of today’s Los Angeles Times with a feature story about the imminent publication of a new book.

No, not one whose previously untold story reveals some disturbing social history that L.A.’s city fathers had chosen to hide. On that book the LA Times spilled not a pixel or drop.

What merits all the attention is a slim volume of verse from not so nearby Afghanistan: Poetry of the Taliban.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Kindle or hard copy? But maybe I should wait for the boxed set with Sonnets from Portuguese Nazis and Love Songs of the KKK.

Here’s how the Times’s Laura King summarizes the Taliban’s artistic efforts:

Denounced by some as propaganda by the enemy in America’s longest war, hailed by others as a rare window on a largely hidden world, the verse assembled in “Poetry of the Taliban” is by turns bombastic and introspective, dark and mirthful, ugly and lyrical — and perhaps above all, surprising in its unabashedly emotional tone.

Why we need a “rare window” when for a decade we’ve had a front-row seat is unexplained, but King cites an example:

“I stoned him with the stones of light tears / then I hung my sorrow on the gallows.… / It might have been the wine of your memory / that made my heart drunk five times.”

So is that bombastic, introspective, dark, mirthful, ugly, or lyrical? And was its tone surprisingly emotional?

Let’s clarify with a light edit:

I stoned him with stones the size of my nine-year-old bride/and watched his brains ooze onto the sand where the Christian’s home once stood. / Next time I will heave smaller stones to prolong his agony / which is my joy.

Inexplicably, at least one masterpiece was excluded from the collection:

A millimeter of ankle showed beneath her burka. / This was unwise of her. / I sharpened my scimitar. / And now she has no ankle. / Let that be a lesson.

Though it was obviously written early in the Taliban’s reign, this one was uncovered too late for publication:

Strapping the Semtex to my ribs, / I think of you for the last time. / How you did this yesterday / And I place your toes and eyes and fingers into my pockets for good luck / Just as Khalid will do with my nose tomorrow. / I only hope the 72 virgins don’t look like my sister Khalida.

UPDATE: This latest act should inspire a whole volume of poems. Too bad we can’t close the rare window.

After 25 years, I've gotten the rights back to this landmark first biography of Rod Serling, detailing everything from his deceptively idyllic childhood that he could never recapture, to the haunting World War II experiences that informed his vivid imagination, to his sudden emergence as one of television’s Golden Age luminaries. Last Stop, The Twilight Zone paints a surprising picture of the complex, unhappy man beneath his gregarious yet suave public persona. Despite boatloads of critical and popular acclaim, Serling felt imprisoned by his most famous creation, and began doubting his own talent, causing him to accept nearly any job offered, from writing to pitching products. Here is the Rod Serling we never knew, the man whose success overshadowed his ambitions and, eventually, his life—a life that ended far too prematurely.

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The power we lend to police, prosecutors, and judges often corrupts them into becoming bullies whose allegiance is to winning on behalf of the bureaucracy rather than doing right by the people they’re supposed to serve.